Saturday, January 16/2016

Walking up from the beach we see our friend Mr Walid outside the mosque. He's an Iraqi refugee who lives at the Sunflower and always stops for a chat. His life centres around the mosque and he is pleased to invite us in. We've often admired it from the outside. A beautiful building, 500 years old he says, stone with flying buttresses. We leave our shoes at the door and enter the spare, carpeted interior. J lends me his sunhat, but otherwise I'm pretty well covered. Very peaceful. There are books. Take one if you wish, he says, and J takes a small paperback Koran in English. A few young men are seated cross-legged on the floor for instruction or discussion. We admire the few pictures. The space is large, airy, and pleasant. A lovely, serendipitous encounter. 

Coffee at Harry's Café. Usually fellow coffee drinkers are local Cypriots, though there are also occasional tourists or others. A tall fair haired man, probably in his forties (although we're becoming less reliable estimators as everyone looks younger and younger) arrives with a (probably) Cypriot man. The language of conversation is English but not close enough to assess the accent - the Cypriot is quite loud but his companion inaudible. So play the guess nationality game. Not British or North American. Wearing a waistcoat with quite casual clothes. Not proof positive but material is shiny, satin-like, as opposed to, say, leather. Number two is footwear. Leather sandals could be from anywhere, but these with loudly checked socks. Number three is hair. Shoulder length proves nothing, but the combed straight back look almost certainly European. Concensus, including colouring, Northern European, probably Scandinavian or German. Other considerations are that he is carrying a sketch pad featuring a cartoon and that he is here outside of tourist season, so perhaps slightly atypical in his home country. An interesting pastime. 

Stop at the elephant store on the way home. Notice, not for the first time that unit prices are utterly unreliable, specifically in this case re Famous Grouse whisky, which we don't intend to buy and bread, which we do. The sign says, inaccurately, that a 550 gram loaf of bread at €1.39 is the same price per hundred grams as a 900 gram loaf for €1.99. (And no, I don't carry a calculator or do the precise maths in my head - some things just stand out as an insult to the intelligence). 

More obvious is the whisky. Two bottles of Famous Grouse, one 70 cl and the other a full litre. The full litre one sells for €12.99 (or €1.30 per hundred ml). The 70 cl bottle is €9.99 (or €1.43 per 100 ml). Fair enough. OK, I know. If anybody is actually reading this, they may well be distracted by the actual prices. €12.99 is $20.61 CAD or £9.94. And you can't begin to think about an acceptable blend for that price in Canada or the UK. I also know that in Canada you can't buy a litre of whisky; you'd have to buy 1.14 litres. If you're not Canadian, don't ask. I also know that if Jennifer is reading this she thinks I've totally lost it. Raye, this is where numeracy leads. BUT the thing is, the sign doesn't compare mls at all. It shows the price per gram. GRAMS of whisky? And furthermore it says that the litre costs €3.25 per 100 grams while the 70 cl bottle is €1.43 per 100 grams. Go figure!